Check out their secondary headline:
Beyond parody.
Via Slate:
This week’s weather fiasco in Atlanta, which stranded thousands of commuters on glassy-slick roads and gridlocked the entire metro region for the better part of 24 hours, was caused by a freak snowstorm, they say. And this is true, in the same way it’s true to say the Civil War started because some guys in Charleston, S.C., started lobbing cannon balls at Fort Sumter. But the real problem in Atlanta isn’t snow; the real problem is history.
I grew up in Atlanta and still have scores of friends, former colleagues, and family members in Georgia, so my Facebook feed lit up with snow news long before the first flakes hit. (Southerners greet the prospect of snow with the excitement they usually reserve for rumors of the Second Coming of Jesus. More, actually, since the Second Coming does not entail a frantic race to the store to get milk and toilet paper.) A friend whose office overlooks 10th Street in Midtown posted a picture of the snarled traffic as it was happening, and I knew this was going to be bad, bad, bad. I also knew that I’d be hearing stories about folks coming out to aid stranded motorists, or inviting strangers in for a bowl of hot oatmeal or some such, because Southerners are like that. A New Yorker might go out of his way to help a stranger cross the street in a time of disaster; a Southerner is apt to take him home and cook him dinner. And in fact there were plenty of such vignettes, all of them reminding me of what I miss about living there.
“Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal … such was the South at its best,” wrote W. J. Cash in his classic 1941 work, The Mind of the South. So far, so good—but Cash goes on to describe some less appealing but still quintessentially Southern traits, among them being “suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too-narrow sense of social responsibility.” And, of course, “too great an attachment to racial values”—or, so as not to mince words, racism.
What does this have to do with snow? Let us review.
And, of course, there’s race. Race is a recurring motif in the long history of the city-rural divide in Georgia politics, as well as the uneasy history of relations between the leaders in City Hall and the state Capitol just down the street. Much as white Southerners despise being labeled “racist” whenever they vote Republican—and I do understand why that makes them mad—it is still a fact that you cannot separateanything in the South entirely from the question of race.